Abstract

Ternary chalcogenides form the most fascinating class of and exhibit a variety of structures and properties. They play an important role in many applications as they have very interesting electronic and magnetic properties. Some of the metal–oxide nanoparticles (NPs) show quite unusual optical, electronic, and magnetic properties differing from their bulk counterparts. Though the bonding in oxides is basically ionic in nature, covalent bonding, to some extent, also exists because of overlapping between p-orbitals of the filled oxide and the vacant d-orbitals of the transition metal cations. The ternary metal oxides possess multiple oxidation states, which will enable them to participate in multiple redox reactions. Ternary oxide nanostructured materials can also be used as supercapacitors (Chen et al. 2015).